Most of you that know me, be it via the internet or in real life, know of the amount of time I have spent in front of a computer screen. I'm not going to lie about it - I've spent the greater part of the last 5 years in front of this 19" monitor, and only recently have I been forced to relinquish that addiction for lack of time. If you don't know by now, you can typically reach me via the following "IM" programs / handles:

• ICQ - 104869035
• AIM - ModusVirt2
• MSN - modus_poa@hotmail.com

Entertainment - Employment

During that tenure of addiction, however, I got involved with a few interesting groups here and there, mainly having to do with computer games and the communities that are created to support them. They are, in chronological order:

• Tribes
• WWIIOnline

Those two software packages absorbed obscene amounts of my time. In the Tribes community, in which my active participation encompassed the majority of 1998, 1999, and 2000, I ended up being an active volunteer Operator for the Dynamix IRC server (irc.dynamix.com), fulfilling various roles including moderator as well as tech support. This led to my befriending a certain individual who went by the moniker "Sixxo" in the fall of '99 whilst I was attending Indiana University [and playing a whole hell of a lot of Tribes, Counter-Strike, and other online games...], who then introduced me to a new title in the initial production states called WWIIOnline. The concept immediately got a hold of me, and soon I was actively patrolling the WWIIOnline "Orange" forums, making my presence known. By Christmas I was hatching ideas for a community website to facilitate Axis-side oriented growth and foster player communication and teamwork. The end-product of my labors would be "picked-up" by the software developers and announced at E3 in May of 2000 - OKW had been born!

At about this time, my interest in the Tribes community waned. Tribes 2 was struggling through beta and floundering - most people who received their CDs in the mail were unable to play the current version (later we would find out that Sierra was putting the pressure on Dynamix to deliver a product... this would lead to Dynamix's ultimate downfall and liquidation from the Sierra family). WWIIOnline was sucking me in as I found myself actively participating in the discussion of the mechanics of the game, as well as assisting the developers with technical research matters. I still occasionally checked in on the Tribes community, but it was changing - stagnating nearly, and WWIIOnline was in its genesis.

OKW is still kicking today, nearly 4 years after its official creation and unveiling at E3. To be honest, I think it was at its greatest in about late 2001, early 2002 - most of the community still had not experienced the game, and many still had extremely high expectation of what the gameplay experience would entail. Those of us who were on the inside of the program were privy to see its true self, but even our majority still had faith. The eventual hurried release of the game would stall the community out for a period of time, and by the end of 2002 OKW had rebuilt itself as well as established close ties to the actual in-game command organization (the "German High Command") and was making headway. At about this time, I stood down from the helm and let an associate of mine from Germany take lead (aka, "DerHeld", who remains a close friend to this day). Eventually I would again stand up to take control of the stewardship for another year before finally officially and completely retiring in the fall of 2003.

At the time of this writing, I currently am not involved to any great extent in any online gaming community. The majority of my idle attention is directed towards reenacting and various Console and non-multiplayer computer games (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Mafia, Medieval: Total War, etc).

Despite all this monkey-ing around with games and what-not, I have also found employment sitting in cushy chairs pattering away at keyboards. Upon leaving Indiana University at Christmas time in '99, I returned home to seek out a job. Through a lucky connection orchestrated by my father, I landed a job working as a digital artist at Burrell Professional Labs. My tasks as an artist were limited to negative-retouching and image reconstruction / alteration. Sounds cool, eh? It was, save for the fact that my creative desires seemed wasted. Working at Burrell was engaging, save for the fact that we worked like a factory with quotas, shifts, and punchcards. Not exactly starving-artist wages, of course (I did very well working for Burrell, but when you are working 6 or 7 days a week with 8 hour days, O-T piles up fast), but when it came down to the fundamentals - where was the art? I left the "Rainbow Digital Imaging" department in the fall of '00, my last day being the first of September. At this point, I sought out employment from a good friend of mine from High School who had opened up his own Web-Hosting and Development company the previous year. HTMLHost.NET afforded me the college lifestyle while I was living at home. The pay was good, I was being relatively creative, and it was incredibly relaxed. Granted, we really didn't get much work done, but I had a blast and learned an incredible amount about myself. After working for HTMLHost and learning the tricks of the web-trade (mainly fundamental HTML coding, no flashy stuff), I decided to look towards the professional world. Not having a college degree, I found myself banging my head against closed doors... Back to college it was, and here I am at Purdue.

Only I'm not taking classes, I'm now working in a bar. Go figure.